Deep vs. Homepage Links

what kind of split on inbound links?

[kdobson99]

In the past, I always tried to about evenly split incoming links between my homepage and internal deeper pages. However, it seems to me that most rankings in my niche for longer tail terms pointing to internal pages is more about sitewide authority than the authority of a particular internal page.

In my niche there are about 6 of us out chasing similar geo terms and the rankings of these geo pages is pretty consistent, regardless of who might have more links pointing at one of their particular internal pages. If you look at the rankings for 'buy widget', they are going to be pretty similar in order to those for 'buy widget in florida', regardless of who has more links pointing at their florida widget page. Was just wondering if this seems consistent with the observations of others and whether I might now be better off sending more links to the homepage than my internal pages than I did in the past.

[piatkow]

I wouldn't consider the SERPS in isolation.

I get to impressions of about visitor behaviour from my site stats:
1. Being number 1 in the SERPs isn't important, being in the top 5 is.
2. A lot of people are reluctant to follow internal links if what they want isn't on the landing page.

From those two observations I would rather be at number 3 with a relevant landing page for a search arguement than number 1 with visitors going to my home page.

That could all be a peculiarity of my site but do check out your site stats before making any changes.

[Whitey]

I think there's 2 equally important angles to consider on this.

1. Links that assist an even distribution of page strength [ aka TBPR - toolbar page rank ]. I'd call this a general site strategy.

2. Links that point to on topic subjects, therefore improving the relevancy in G' algo eyes. I'd call this a specific page strategy.